Governments worldwide are moving to limit children’s access to social media as lawmakers question whether platforms are capable of enforcing their own minimum age requirements. TikTok recently became the latest tech giant to give into regulatory pressure when it announced that it would implement a new age-detection system across Europe to keep kids under the age of 13 off the platform.
The system, which follows a year-long pilot in the UK meant to proactively identify and remove underage users, relies on a combination of profile data, content analysis, and behavioral signals to evaluate if an account possibly belongs to a minor. (TikTok requires users to be at least 13 to sign up). According to a statement from the company, its age-detection system does not automatically ban users. The system flags accounts it suspects are run by users under 13 and forwards those accounts to human moderators for review. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
The European rollout comes amid global conversation around the negative effects of social media on children, and as governments debate stricter age-based regulatory approaches. Australia last year became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, including the use of Instagram, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok. The European Parliament is also advocating for mandatory age limits, while Denmark and Malaysia are considering a ban for children under 16.
“We are in the middle of an experiment where American and Chinese tech giants have unlimited access to the attention of our children and young people for hours every single day almost entirely without oversight,” Christel Schaldemose, a Danish lawmaker and vice president of the European Parliament, said in November during parliamentary session that, according to Reuters, “called for an EU-wide ban on access for children under 16 to online platforms, video-sharing sites and AI companions without parental consent and an outright ban for those younger than 13.”
Advocacy groups in Canada are similarly calling for the creation of a dedicated regulatory body to address online harms affecting young people following the flood of sexualized deepfakes on X by its AI chatbot Grok. ChatGPT recently announced that it was rolling out age prediction software to determine whether an account likely belongs to someone under 18 so the correct safeguards can be applied. In the US, 25 states have already enacted some form of age-verification legislation.
“Legislatures in the US, just in the calendar year 2026, are likely to pass dozens or possibly hundreds of new laws requiring online age authentication,” says Eric Goldman, a law professor and associate dean at Santa Clara University, who has argued that any “government-compelled censorship” should automatically be looked at as “constitutionally suspect.”
“Unless something dramatically changes,” Goldman says, “regulators around the globe are building a legal infrastructure that will require most websites and apps to be age-authenticated.”
As platforms act to properly address age verification, does TikTok’s strategy of monitoring users instead of banning kids outright seem like a good compromise? That depends on how you feel about digital surveillance.
“This is a fancy way of saying that TikTok will be surveilling its users’ activities and making inferences about them,” says Goldman. Because platform governance is often tied to political motives, and policy solutions sometimes expose children to more harm than help, Goldman refers to age verification mandates as “segregate-and-suppress laws.”
“Users probably aren’t thrilled about this extra surveillance, and any false positives—like incorrectly identifying an adult as a child—will have potentially major consequences for the wrongly identified user.” Goldman adds that even if this is the right approach for TikTok, most services don’t have enough data about their users to reliably guess peoples’ ages, so the approach is not really scalable across other platforms.
Though TikTok’s UK pilot led to the removal of thousands of additional accounts belonging to children under 13, the company also acknowledged that no globally accepted method exists to verify age without undermining user privacy.
Alice Marwick, director of research at the tech policy nonprofit Data & Society, says TikTok’s age-detection tech does seem marginally better than automatic bans, but it still requires the platform to surveil users ever more closely. “This will inevitably expand systematic data collection, creating new privacy risks without any clear evidence that it improves youth safety,” she says. “Any systems that try to infer age from either behavior or content are based on probabilistic guesses, not certainty, which inevitably proceed with errors and bias that are more likely to impact groups that TikTok’s moderators do not have cultural familiarity with.”
The hypocrisy of the process is not lost on Goldman. Last October, in testimony before the New Zealand Parliament’s education and workforce committee, he noted that if the goal of age verification is to keep children safer, “it is cruelly ironic to force children to regularly disclose highly sensitive private information and increase their exposure to potentially life-changing data security violations.”
The European Union often functions as a test bed that nudges platforms toward global defaults, and other countries are already taking note.
“Historically, if you look at the internet, it was borderless, no-holds barred, and the rule of law within a country was irrelevant in many ways. But we’re starting to see a shift in that now,” says Lloyd Richardson, director of technology at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. “Organizationally, we believe that the road they’re going down in Australia is the right approach in terms of having a social media delay.”
Site-wide bans in Canada, what Richardson calls “the nuclear option,” seem unlikely anytime soon. In 2024, Canadian lawmakers introduced the Online Harms Act, which, among its many conditions, would have established a digital safety oversight board to manage and enforce legislation, in addition to appointing an ombudsman to field concerns from social media users. The bill never passed.
“We shouldn’t really put the trust of what’s developmentally appropriate into the hands of big technology companies. We need to look at developmental experts to answer those questions,” Richardson adds. “We’re not suggesting that regulation is a silver bullet that’s going to solve all those problems, but it would certainly be a helpful place to start with all of these issues we’re dealing with. A delay to 16 years old is much better for children.”
The debate around online child safety raises broader questions about whether technology alone can resolve what is fundamentally a policy and societal challenge. Marwick worries that the core issue isn’t the sophistication of the age-detection method, “it’s whether large-scale age-gating is the right tool to make kids safer online, improve their health and wellness, or give them more control over their digital experiences.” The current system just “creates lots of friction and data collection without necessarily improving outcomes for users.”
While TikTok’s new approach may be viable under EU regulatory frameworks, it’s much harder to see it working in the US. “Here, the legal exposure is significantly higher,” says Jess Miers, an assistant professor at the University of Akron School of Law, given that many state laws are getting repeatedly tied up in First Amendment litigation. She adds that without a federal privacy law, “there are no meaningful guardrails on how this data is stored, shared, or abused not just by the companies collecting it but by the government itself. It could be handed to ICE. It could be used to target women searching for reproductive care. It could be used against LGBTQ+ teens seeking information on gender-affirming treatment. And it absolutely will be used to chill speech.”
TikTok is no exception. The company said the appeals process for its age-detection tech relies on the third-party verification vendor Yoti, and also uses traditional verification tools such as credit cards and government-issued IDs—mechanisms that raise concerns about privacy and trust. Yoti, which is also used by Spotify and Meta’s Facebook, has drawn criticism from users worried about excessive data collection and potential leaks. The UK company says it has done more than 1 billion age checks and completes, on average, an estimated 1 million per day.
In an email, a Yoti spokesperson told WIRED it estimates ages without identifying individuals and, for systems like TikTok’s, it permanently deletes images after an age result is given. The company says it has never reported a data breach related to facial age estimation.
“We have no need and no desire to keep the image used for age checks, so we don’t,” the spokesperson said.
“People do a lot of fear mongering when it comes to age verification,” Richardson says, adding that there is a lot of disinformation around the topic. “But there are absolutely ways to do age verification without AI face scanning, without the disclosure of personal information.”
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